Page 34 of Playing with Fire

With my ears flopped in misery, I struggled to dig my way deeper into the ash to hide from the neutralizer-infused water. I still wasn’t sure how I ended up on top of the debris pile instead of beneath it, but I already regretted not having been buried. At the bottom of the ash, concrete, and steel, I’d stay warm for a little while longer.

I blamed magic. If physics had had anything to do with my situation, I’d already be dead rather than slowly freezing to death. It was the napalm’s fault, too. My decision to gobble it down had nothing to do with it. The volume of the spray intensified, and I unsheathed my claws to aid digging into the pile so I could hide from the wet.

My efforts to burrow didn’t help, not one bit. I curled into a shivering ball, tucking my hooves as close to my body as I could. Why did they need to spray so much? The dust was dead. The neutralizer was blatant overkill. I had reduced an entire skyscraper to ash. Why did they have to drench the ash and me along with it?

Then again, leveling one of Wall Street’s predominant skyscrapers wasn’t exactly a good thing. I expected a lengthy lecture on proper napalming techniques. The CDC would probably start with the fact I’d gobbled down napalm like it was candy. Maybe if I pitched my excessive rampage of destruction as reducing the cost of debris removal, they’d look the other way.

Who was I kidding? As soon as the CDC got hold of me, I was a dead unicorn. I missed the magical fire’s searing intensity. A final attempt to burrow ended with me tangled in the mess of twisted metal and chunks of concrete somehow left intact.

More neutralizing spray rained down, chilling me until I couldn’t even snort smoke. I rested my chin on a steel girder and whimpered. Maybe my napalm binge had something to do with my survival, but did it have to hurt so much? How had I avoided being crushed?

Stupid magic, breaking the laws of physics without being nice enough to prevent the worst hangover of my life from pummeling me. The idea I had survived an inferno only to freeze to death in the final stages of decontamination capped my already miserable day.

As though hearing my thoughts, the universe decided to remind me things could get worse. The man-made rain intensified to a deluge, washing away my blanket of ash.

“Noooo,” I whined, uncurling to dig into the debris so I could steal its residual heat. The remnant chunks of concrete broke apart and washed away, leaving me with the more stubborn metal, which caught on my fur.

Great. Not only was I inflicted with the worst headache I’d ever experienced, I was cold, I was soaked, and I was stuck. Why did the CDC have to go to extremes to make sure the dust was eradicated? I had no doubt the fires had gotten rid of every last speck of it. Then again, I couldn’t blame them. The real issue was me; had my flames purged the contamination from my body?

I thought so. For one blissful moment, I had been one with the inferno. I already missed the wild and destructive freedom—and its warmth. The cold numbed me and smothered me until bone-deep lethargy pulled me into miserable darkness.

The crackle of the shield shattering roused me and signaled the end of the cold rain. The respite didn’t last long, as someone had the bright idea to spray the ruins with a fire hose. Why? Why would they do that?

If I could have gotten up, I would have hunted the culprit down and stabbed them with my horn before eating them. My fur plastered to me, and I wailed, “Noooo. Wat-ter bad.”

The stream cut off, and someone in a white hazmat suit braved the rubble, picking their way towards me, a meter in one hand. I lifted my head and snorted a warning, baring my teeth as a promise of what I’d do to them and their protective gear if they messed with me.

“Scan is clear. I seem to have located an aggressive, oversized drowned rat, sir.”

Ah, good old Perky. He always knew the exact thing to say to piss me off. “Rat? Rat? Purr-key, I will eat you! Cold. Fire gone. Bring fire back.”

Perky crouched in front of me and shoved the meter in my mouth. “Breathe on the sensor, Gardener. It’s on close-range, high-sensitivity. If you’ve got any dust in your system, it’ll detect it.”

I clamped my teeth on the device hard enough to keep hold of it, snorting out my nose to remind him I couldn’t breathe out of my mouth. I gave it a few licks and spit it out. “No breathe through mouth, idiot Perky. Nose only.”

“Ah, right.”

I should have known he’d ram the sensor up a nostril. It hurt, and I snorted in my effort to dislodge the obnoxious device. It remained silent.

“You’re clean.”

“Yippee. No box for me. I’m cold, Purr-key. Cold. Make wat-ter go away. I’m wet.”

After hanging the meter from his utility belt, Perky gave my shoulder a pat. “Sir, she’s clean. Body temp seems really low, but otherwise, she seems fine. There is one problem. She’s tangled in the debris, and I’m not sure I can get her out. Yes, I’m certain she’s clean, sir. The napalm must have gotten it all, and if she breathed any in, the high temperatures must have cooked it out of her.”

I lifted my head enough I could use Perky’s foot as a pillow. “Lit napalm. Did good?”

Perky scratched behind my ears. “You did great, Gardener. Sit tight. We’ll get you out of there. I’m not sure how, but we’ll figure something out.”

It took a crane, a couple of blowtorches, and some elbow grease to extricate me from the rubble. Perky kept me company the entire time, and my whining bore fruit when someone finally took pity on me and brought over a high-powered lamp to help ward away the chill. Full darkness had fallen by the time I staggered onto the sidewalk in front of the destroyed building.

I’d never seen Wall Street so deserted before, and I shivered at the disconcerting sight. Without a reason to delay asking, I mumbled, “Quinn safe?”

While I’d burned the napalm for Perky, my worries for the police chief had driven me to ensure the whole place toppled in an inferno so intense I questioned if I had existed as anything other than flame while it had burned.

Perky ditched the containment suit in a pile on the road before pointing at the nearest traffic barricade. “He’s over there. Last I heard he was screaming something about skinning a crazy, suicidal pyromaniac unicorn.”

I spotted a stack of blankets off to the side, and I shuffled to them, lowering my head to grab one in my teeth, turning to hold it out to Perky. Around a mouthful of plush fabric, I said, “Still cold. Want blanket.”